art quilt design – Page 2

Weeknight Sewing

I’m midway through Highest Duty by Capt. Sully Sullenberger and I continued listening to the audio book last night while I sewed; I think the story is very compelling. I love listening to a good story while I’m working on a creative project. When I’m finished I’ll write more about what I think about the book.

So, this is my “quilt top”; all my pieces of hand-dyed or screen-printed fabric are sewn together here, along with the piece of fabric along the sides with the reverse applique clouds. Remember, all this fabric was once as white as snow:

Now I’ll start adding shapes to the top, as well as cutting some away; here’s the first “sheer” shape I added, you can see it in the upper left-hand corner:

It’s faint, but that’s the idea. Soon I’ll have layers of different shapes. I hope it’ll look as cool as I imagine it.

Reverse Applique: A Weekend Sampler

I think one big secret to any successful art quilt design is making samples. A sample is a helpful way to “audition” a technique on a micro-level before taking the plunge into the art quilt itself. So, this past Saturday I made a small sample using sheer fabrics and reverse applique. I learned both techniques from Libby Lehman, who is a very gifted artist and teacher, and I encourage anyone who reads this to look into her work.

Before starting my project I first had to make some scones, though: a weekend morning is all about carbs and coffee. There are lots of scone recipes online; this one is pretty good, though I substituted plain yogurt for vanilla yogurt and added a bit more sugar, and I used half spelt flour, and I baked the scones on parchment. But this recipe gives you the proportions. Here are the scones, just egg-washed:

While I was winding my bobbins I let them over-bake, but they turned out really good:

Thus armed, I started my sample.

In my current project, I have a “design motif” of a flower-shape based on desert verbena. I want to repeat this design motif multiple times in my piece; this is generally a good design principle, at least for me. Using sheer fabric to add a thin, nearly transparent applique is one way; using reverse applique is another way: both of these techniques add very little heft to the quilt top itself.

In both reverse applique and sewing sheer fabrics onto a quilt top, you need a background fabric, which in this case is yellow hand-dyed cotton sateen and is about the size of a fat-eighth; on top of the yellow fabric is a layer of pink polyester tulle, which I’d painted to get that color, if you look at the bottom left corner you can see the 2 fabrics:

Flipped over, you can see I’ve attached some stabilizer scraps with spray-adhesive. The stabilizer is a cotton-pulp fiber that I got on a giant roll from a company in Minnesota; it works well with my machine– you have to experiment with your machine to figure out which stabilizer works best.

So, to get started, I now have the following fabric sandwich: background fabric, tulle on the top and stabilizer on the back:

Below on the left is a pattern for a large verbena flower; I drew the design on the stabilizer part of the fabric sandwich:

Then I sewed over the drawn line with straight-stitch (use a small stitch) along the drawn line. I then reinforced with another line of stitch to make sure it was nice and strong, this is what it looks like on the back….

…and the front…

I then pulled off all the stabilizer from the back, then gently snipped away all the unnecessary tulle on the front, and all that was left was this nice flower held in place with 2 rows of straight-stitch:

So. Now I want to actually start the reverse-applique; I have one layer, now on to the second layer. I draw an outline of the same shape, just smaller:

I then pick the fabric for this flower, a fuschia I dyed, and I used spray adhesive to attach the stabilizer to the wrong side of the fabric; the fuschia fabric is then placed under the yellow fabric, so that the new small flower shape is directly over the fuschia fabric underneath:

Because I use an older machine, I have to unscrew the presser foot in order to fit my embroidery hoop under the needle; then I reattached the presser foot.

The new fabric sandwich–yellow fabric on top, fushia fabric with stabilizer underneath– is then slid into the embroidery hoop, and again straight stitch is used (small stitch) to stitch over the drawn flower shape.

Once sewn, the new, smaller verbena looks like this:

I carefully used snips and cut away the top yellow fabric to reveal the fuschia underneath; at this point I realized I needed to use reverse applique again to make the small pink center for the flower, so I did that in a pinch, using the same techiques described above: now, I have 3 layers: tulle flower, reverse applique flower and reverse applique flower center. Cool!

The whole piece then goes back in the embroidery hoop and I used satin stitch over the raw edges of the flower. It looks OK; my foot pedal had a small short in it which just got worse as I sewed, to a point where I could only get the machine to sew if I used the ball of my foot: an ergonomic nightmare. So it’s not the best satin stitch; I didn’t bother trying to finish the center.

So, the general idea is to use the above technique on my big project; here’s an idea of where some of the shapes might be placed:

But my sewing machine is in the shop now, as of this morning: oh well. Looks like I’ll be working on fiddle tunes the next few days…

Art Quilt as Blog Banner, or, Birth of a Blog

I’ve wanted to blog for a while, but always found a reason not to. I first thought about blogging during last year’s ginormous financial meltdown, when the only person (surprise) providing any real useful information was John Stewart. Does anyone remember that episode when he found the conch? That summed up so accurately the spirit of desperation then. When I saw that, I thought: I really need to have a blog.

Then, a few months later when Capt. Sully Sullenberger landed that plane in the Hudson, I thought: I should be blogging! That was absolutely brilliant and heroic. I was really annoyed with myself then that I didn’t have a blog.

So at that point, I started thinking about what my blog would look like. If I blogged. And I started to build the art quilt that would be my blog banner. I took my time, of course; I don’t like to rush; and, more importantly, I really favor a more introspective approach to blogging. And I wanted things to look right.

So, to start, I turned to my trusty overhead projector:

birth of a blog 1

As you can see, I still remember some Palmer method from grade school. I colored in my cursive; then I added in a free-hand fiddle, button accordion and sewing machine to sum up the tangible blog-themes I could think of:

birth of a blog 2

Then I realized I’d forgotten the bow:

birth of a blog #3

Then I took it outside and sponged on dye. I had to dye the fabric and throw it in the washing machine a total of three times before I got the look I wanted, which was something like this:

birth of a blog #4

After I was done dyeing the fabric, I quilted it together and–voila!–my banner was finished. As were my excuses. So, welcome to my blog!